Regrets
Ares woke with his mouth filled with dust and regret, the sun stabbing through the thin fabric of a shirt he did not remember fastening. His head throbbed like a drum.
He blinked, disoriented, and the facts of last night came back in fits: the confessions, the music, the fight in the grass, the way Tessa had looked at him as though they’d shared a small, terrible truce. Then further back and deeper, he remembered Tessa on the bench and Chloe at his side. For a couple of slow seconds the floor dropped out and he felt like a man who had fallen and was still falling.
Tessa stirred next to him, and when she opened her eyes, Ares saw fatigue drawn deep into the angles of her face. There was no triumphant glow, only the precise, exhausted look of someone who’d traded one crisis for
